In a message dated 10/15/2004 12:51:30 PM Mountain Standard Time,
gbnewby@pglaf.org writes:
In
short,
sniffing old books can get you high and/or cause
hallucination.
And if you have asthma . . . I'm trying to work (my
own, not PGLAF's) on copying some 1930s translations
of Ancient Egyptian medical textbooks. I need them
for a book I'm writing. Egad! They are killing me!
But just in case anyone wonders, the Egyptians by
about 2500 to 3000 BCE had medicine at a height
it wouldn't reach again until the late 19th-early 20th
centuries. Imhotep was both the architect for the
Great Pyramid AND the author of the first surgical
textbook known to have existed. He got a lot of
practice by studying people who had been injured
at the construction sight, but he clearly also accompanied
an army into battle at least once, because he also
describes battlefield injuries.
I would scan them for PGLAF before sending them
back to the universities they came from, but my
scanner program has indigestion. It's glad to
photocopy, but if I ask it to scan and save it lies
down and turns up its little curly toes, insisting it
HAS saved when it patently has not. Also, one of
the books is somewhat bigger than my scanner.
Anne